2.24.2014

Greenspan's Body Count: slaughter in the developing world

BOLLIKUNTA, India — Latha Reddy Musukula was making tea on a recent morning when she spotted the moneylenders walking down the dirt path toward her house.

They came in a phalanx of 15 men, by her estimate. She knew their faces, because they had walked down the path before.

After each visit, her husband, a farmer named Veera Reddy, sank deeper into silence, frozen by some terror he would not explain.

Three times he cut his wrists. He tied a noose to a tree, relenting when the family surrounded him, weeping. In the end, he waited until Musukula stepped out, and then he hanged himself from a pipe supporting their roof, leaving a careful list of each debt he owed to each moneylender. She learned the full sum then: 400,000 rupees, or $6,430.

A debt-ridden factory owner jumped to his death from 6th floor of an apartment building in Tong’an District on Friday after failed suicide attempt with gas, reports Xiamen Daily.

The police received a report of a gas explosion in an apartment building at around 9 o’clock in the morning. After arriving at the scene, they found the glass frame of an apartment on the 6th floor was severely deformed in the explosion, and glass fragments scattered on the floor.

The police also found a dying man lying in a pool of blood on the terrace on the second floor. He was immediately sent to a nearby hospital, but later died in the hospital.

The police said the 38-year-old man surnamed Liu was from Wuping County in southwestern Fujian and was the owner of the apartment on the 6th floor where the gas explosion happened.

His relative said Liu, who ran a factory in Tong’an District, could commit suicide himself as they revealed he was heavily in debt and could not repay the debt.